The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  “Foster, I don’t care about that. I’m leaving and I’m taking your car.”

  “We’ll find Katarina.” He cocked his head. “Things do happen for a reason. Let’s go.”

  It was a ten-hour drive from Hardale to Amarillo. Foster slept most of the way. When he woke, it startled Ryan.

  “You have any idea how much money Rachel spent on Botox? It’s a wonder she could smile. And why would an angel need artificial breasts?” He fell asleep when Ryan pulled onto Highway 87. Most of the towns along the way had one stoplight, one Walmart, one high school, five churches, and a bar.

  The rhythm of the road gave Ryan some perspective. Seeing Sean had given him the strength he needed to think straight and hardened his resolve to search wherever and for as long as it took to find Katarina.

  He tried to remember how it had felt when his own father died—the anger and loneliness. Katarina, though, had been all alone until Ryan found Nutter House that day. He remembered the sassy little kid and her skateboard—she wouldn’t even tell him her name. The thought brought a smile, and then he thought of Katarina’s dad.

  For him, it wasn’t the dying that was so bad, it was the missing out on watching his little girl grow up—that’s what cancer had stolen from him.

  In a quiet, almost tender voice, Foster said, “Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”

  “Oh, hey, sorry. I didn’t know you were awake. I guess I’m just kinda freakin’ out.” Ryan pasted a smile on his face. “We should make Amarillo in about an hour.”

  Ryan handed Foster his cell phone and told him to call Dodge. Dodge told them where the truck stop was and that a small brown-haired girl with weird clothes and a black backpack was in the restaurant.

  Dodge’s contact drove a purple-and-black Peterbilt that was parked in a row of other huge shiny trucks outside a diner at the center of a gargantuan parking lot. Ryan left Foster and the Porsche in a parking space painted to fit an eighteen-wheeler.

  The guy was wearing a denim jacket and a Dodgers baseball cap. Ryan introduced himself, and the man pulled a toothpick out of his mouth. “Girl matchin’ the description has been here for two days. She just sat at a booth inside.”

  Ryan lunged for the door. The man caught Ryan’s shoulder. “Slow down. Sometimes these girls change while they’re on the road. If this is the kid you’re lookin’ for, you’re likely to be disappointed.”

  He led Ryan into the diner and then cocked his head toward a booth in the corner. Two large men with a small girl between them and another man across the table leaned forward as though whispering. Her hair was the right color and her shoulders were the right size. She was wearing a white T-shirt with a strange design: Celtic knots that looked drawn in with a marking pen. He stepped up to the table. “Katarina?”

  The girl looked up—no older than sixteen, with freckles and pimples visible under a thick layer of makeup. Ryan’s heart collapsed as fast as it had soared.

  Ryan and Foster left a trail of posters at gas stations, diners, and at all the cheap hotels along I-40, then up I-15, through Las Vegas, to I-80. Every day, Dodge reported a new possibility and they checked it out. Ryan clung to the image of Sean walking up to that table. The rush of emotion had been so huge, but one thing scared the shit out of him: had he traded one kid for the other?

  The body isn’t designed to maintain high levels of adrenaline for weeks. Each day the panic diminished, and Ryan felt the sands of resignation burying him. His thoughts started to drift from Katarina to Sean. He fought it.

  One kid at a time.

  At a truck stop outside Salt Lake City, Ryan was sure that he’d see Katarina trudging around a corner or maybe skateboarding along a sidewalk. But four days later, in an all-too-similar truck stop near Reno, he dragged his feet across the parking lot, asking the same old questions, but there was no sign of Katarina.

  They stopped at Lake Tahoe—and yeah, it sure was blue. Ryan walked the streets for an hour. They went to Emerald Bay and talked to the ranger who cared for the old mansion. He showed them where Katarina had slept and, shaking his head, described how he had tried to talk her into going home.

  They spent the next day stopping at gas stations along Highway 50 and I-80, putting up posters and asking people if they’d seen her. Having made no progress and being so close to the source, Ryan decided to head back to Petaluma to see if he could find any indication of what Katarina might have planned.

  It was afternoon when Foster parked the Porsche behind Ryan’s Probe along the curb next to Nutter House. Emmy came out to greet them. Her hair was dark brown speckled with gray strands. Ryan put his arms around her and held her tight. She buried her face in his chest. “Why would Katarina do this?”

  Dodge was standing in the doorway looking severe. “None of her teachers know anything, and the cops are useless.” He turned back inside.

  Ryan followed. The screen door slammed into his back. It felt good. It felt alive. “What about Marti? And Alex? What about Broken Skeg?”

  “None of them know anything,” Dodge said. “She cut all of them off after she got busted—just Kat and her paints and weird clothes.” Dodge led Ryan into his office and handed him a file.

  Ryan sat in the chair across Dodge’s desk. The revolver was sitting on the gavel pad. For once, he didn’t fidget. He opened the folder. Each page was titled with someone’s name, contact information, and the last time that person had seen a girl resembling Katarina.

  Emmy and Foster stepped in and stood behind him.

  Ryan sighed. “Where’s Jane?”

  Dodge said, “Probably camping out at the cemetery.”

  “I’ve been studying Kat’s murals,” Emmy said. “In the last few months, her paintings have become totally intense. They’re almost like scratch paper. She sorted out her thoughts in paintings the same way she scratched out diagrams and set up equations.”

  Ryan stood, somewhat reinvigorated—touring truck stops, diners, and highway rest areas had come to feel as though he was just going through the motions. He felt closer to Katarina now.

  Ryan and Emmy went upstairs, while Foster stayed with Dodge.

  A mural that Ryan had never seen stretched across Katarina’s bedroom walls, around the corners and onto the ceiling. A multicolored cloud formed of thousands of paint smudges, but with puffy curving lines defining the edges covered most of the ceiling. A landscape scene surrounding the window precisely completed the view outside. Ryan stood over a bright red dot in the center of the floor. He stared outside and crouched down. “She completed the image perfectly. The mountains in the painting match the view outside from this height. I can even tell how tall she is.” He stood up straight and then crouched down again. “Where is she?”

  Emmy put her hand on his lower back and pulled him toward her. “Listen to me.”

  He kept looking out the window.

  “If you want to help Kat, you need to concentrate. You know her better than anyone, and that knowledge is our best chance of finding her.”

  On the wall that Katarina’s apartment shared with Ryan’s, the mural included a cartoon whiteboard, probably in the spot where theirs hung on the other side of the wall. The whiteboard was covered with equations and Feynman diagrams. A man-sized bird stood in front of it holding a marker. It had a huge beak and was painted white with a few pink dots and a red bristle on its head. The bristle made it resemble a rooster, but Ryan recognized it immediately as a pelican.

  Emmy said, “It’s you.”

  “I never pictured myself as a pelican before.”

  A big raindrop shape trickled down the wall from the cloud on the ceiling, poised over the pelican-Ryan’s head. It encompassed a slew of little smudges, just like the cloud. Emmy stood on the bed for a closer look. “They’re names. Each smudge is someone’s name. They’re dim and most are illegible, but your sisters’ names are here. And look, she circled my name in a heart.”

  “She mentioned something about this on the phone,” Ryan said. “I didn’t re
ally understand. We were discussing neural nets and free will. She talked a lot about how people get character—the ingredients that make people unique. She said that neural nets exchange pieces of themselves through their affection. She liked the word affection.”

  Ryan sat on the bed and stared across the room at Katarina’s original mural, the one she’d been working on when he moved in. It was a collage of self-portraits and little sketches of her friends. He walked over and looked at them up close.

  There was a portrait of her father holding her hand. He was penciled in with wispy lines, more like a shadow than a person. Photo-size sketches of Katarina followed in a row. She got taller and her hair grew longer in each, and Ryan could see how her clothes had evolved. In the early ones, she was skating.

  The last two differed from the rest. They were nearly identical, like two adjacent frames in a reel of film. In the other sketches, except for the one where she was holding her dad’s hand, she faced straight out of the wall, but not in the last two. In the second-to-last, she was looking toward the last one as though she were looking into the future, and in the last, she looked up at the ceiling to the cloud made of all the different-colored names.

  Emmy started pulling things out from under the bed: crumpled papers, dirty clothes, some crusty dishes, books, and a couple of binders.

  The sound of Emmy uncrumpling sheets of paper brought Ryan back to reality. He coughed and focused on the corners of the room. He went through Katarina’s desk drawers, looking for her QED notebook. He couldn’t imagine her leaving it behind. There were other notebooks and sketchpads and, at the back of her top drawer, in a little jewelry box, was a stack of notes that her father had written to her while he was in the hospital. They said simple things. Things that fathers say to their little girls about times they shared—one day they found a bunch of peacock feathers at a park, and he asked her to please not forget that day because it was the best day of his life. One said, “When you need me, look inside. You’ll see me looking back. I promise.”

  Ryan’s eyes welled up, and in the rush of emotion, he got confused and read the note again. The words, the dragons, the pelican, the names in the cloud—a sense of Katarina’s presence rushed in like a wave unfurling on a beach—he didn’t so much read the words as hear them, hear them in Katarina’s voice. “When you need me, look inside. You’ll see me looking back. I promise.” Ryan pushed the thought away.

  He shook his head to clear it out, looked out the window, and said, “When you can’t find something, where do you look?”

  Emmy replied, “Where you last saw it.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  The Probe’s engine turned over a couple of hundred times before it finally started. The Porsche was right behind him—he had its keys in his pocket—but he decided to take the car that Katarina would recognize.

  The roads curved, and the Probe’s suspension complained. He paused at the summit, the ocean on the horizon to one side and the valley on the other—“This is the world. Live in it.” He continued along the road and parked in that same spot at McClure Beach. He walked along the sandy path. Ice plant, lupines, and daisies were blooming now. It had been seven months since the two of them had walked down this path together.

  Along the beach, he watched seagulls arguing over decaying crabs. A V-shaped flock of pelicans skimmed over the water, and he ran alongside until he reached the rocks and tide pools. He climbed up to the boulder where he and Katarina had sat together. The waves were big, crashing against the rocks. In her phone message, Katarina had told him that she’d been here, that this was where she “figured it out.” He smiled at the recollection of her saying “It’s fucking amazing” and then apologizing for saying fuck.

  He had to focus. There had to be a clue.

  Guided by the self-portraits on her wall, he rebuilt as many memories of her as he could. Something on a rock outcropping above the waves moved, waking him from concentration. A pelican waddled up the rocks, a fat pelican with one wing drooping at its side. It pecked among the tide pools and then tossed its beak up, swallowing whatever gunk it had found. Katarina had mentioned the pelican too.

  He forced himself to relax. The fixation that she was dead was irrational. He had to muster the strength to keep from surrendering to it. Wasn’t that the mistake he’d made all those years ago in the face of methamphetamine? Surrendering to the pain instead of fighting?

  Something cold, sharp, and prickly poked his hand. His arm was resting on a boulder where he’d been tapping his fingers, but now the pelican was standing on the back of that hand, its webbed feet digging into his skin. The pelican stared back. Ryan leaned forward and faced the bird. Its breath smelled fishy, like fresh fish. It reminded Ryan of the sushi on his first date with Emmy.

  The distraction was good. It helped him dispel the ghosts and ask the fundamental question: where the hell is that kid?

  The pelican poked its beak into a crevice between two rocks and struggled. It had found a crab, but the gap was too small for it to pull the crab out. Something else was stuck in the crevice, a sheet of graph paper. Ryan pulled on the pelican until it let go of the crab. It complained with the sound of a duck imitating a seagull.

  Ryan worked the sheet of paper out of the rock. It was wet, making it difficult to decipher, but he discovered several other sheets of paper in higher cracks that were shielded from the ocean spray. No question, they were Katarina’s—a flowchart of the last neural net that she’d described to him. But there was some doodling too, like that cloud on the ceiling in her room with the big raindrop over the pelican-Ryan’s head. This one was a diagram of a multiple feedback neural net; the feedback loops all leaked down from other neural networks in the cloud.

  Ryan couldn’t help but think of the drawings of helicopters that da Vinci had made—it was Katarina’s all right, the mathematician with the heart of an artist.

  Dodge leaned back in his chair with two files open on the desk in front of him. In one were notes from Dodge’s contacts about teenage girls who had been seen between Petaluma and Houston, a separate sheet for every girl. The other contained details of girls recently reported missing.

  Foster said, “You’ve located half a dozen runaways.”

  Dodge replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Have you connected them with their parents?”

  “Don’t really give a fuck, Reed. I’m looking for Kat.”

  It was easy to match sightings and reports. Foster reached across and pulled the phone over. When it was halfway across the desk, it rang, startling him. Dodge reached across and jerked it away.

  Dodge answered with, “What have you got?” He took a legal pad and flipped to a blank page.

  At the other end, the voice said, “What will you give me for it?”

  Dodge said, “Ah-ha, would this be slippery Jeff Spilling?”

  “I found the kid.”

  “Put her on.”

  “Can’t exactly do that, Nutter. First I need some recompense.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Kimball Junction, just outside Salt Lake City.”

  Dodge grabbed the stack of paper from Foster and flipped through it. “I had two reports from I-80; neither of them panned out.”

  “Well, she’s here and you know what I need.”

  “If you can deliver the kid, you can forget your warrants in Michigan.”

  “You mean LA?”

  “Whatever.” Dodge drew a little empty square in the margin of the blank sheet and wrote clear Spilling in LA. “Put her on.”

  “Like I said, I can’t exactly put her on, but I’m pretty sure this is the kid you’re after. Weird clothes—skirt’s all marked up with designs, suede boots like Boy George wore in the eighties. She had a laptop and a couple of notebooks. Lots of diagrams.”

  Dodge could hear him flip through pages. “You have her stuff but not her?”

  “Nutter, I’m at the morgue. The kid’s dead, thrown from the back of a tr
uck. Drunk driver plowed into a pickup on I-80 almost a week ago. She was in back. Dude driving the truck said she was hitching—picked her up in Vegas, said her name was Kate.”

  “Hang on.” Dodge cupped a hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to Foster. “Go get my sister.”

  Foster did what he was told. Dodge waited until Emmy came in. “Guy on the phone thinks he has Kat’s notebook.” Then, into the phone, “I’m putting on someone who will know if it’s Kat’s book or not.” Dodge handed the phone to Emmy.

  Emmy asked Spilling to describe the diagrams and drawings. Her voice got louder as she grew frustrated that the man didn’t understand her questions. Eventually, she handed the phone back to Dodge. “Okay, those are Kat’s notes. Where is she?”

  Dodge spoke into the phone. “What’s next?”

  “The cops need the next of kin to ID the body.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Just pictures—she’s kind of mangled, but it’s a match. So I’m clean in LA?”

  “Oh.” Dodge hung his head. “Yeah, come Friday no one will want you in LA either.” He hung up the phone and stared at a space on the desk between Foster and Emmy. “She died in a car accident. The cops need Jane to ID her.”

  Foster took a deep breath.

  Emmy turned away. She made a sharp agonized sound and covered her face with her hands.

  Dodge wrote three addresses on a pad along with directions to the cemetery, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Emmy. “Jane’ll be at one of these places. If her bike isn’t there, she isn’t either. When you find her, tell her we heard something. Don’t tell her that her kid is dead—I will handle that.”

  Emmy took the sheet and walked out.

  Dodge tapped on the desk, staring at the revolver.

  Foster sighed and looked up in the shadows of the dark office.

  Neither spoke for several minutes. Finally, Dodge leaned down, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out two shot glasses and the bottle of Irish whiskey. He poured both full and slid one across the desk to Foster, motioning him to pick it up. When he did, Dodge held his glass and said, “Here’s to Kat. This planet’s not worth a shit without her.”